SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1452 (14), Friday, February 27, 2009
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TITLE: Russia Can Survive A Year With No Loans
AUTHOR: By Lyubov Pronina, Torrey Clark and Ellen Pinchuk
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russia has sufficient oil fund reserves to “live through this year without borrowing,” even as the government braces for its first budget deficit in a decade, President Dmitry Medvedev’s top economic adviser said on Thursday.
The government is in “no hurry” to sell bonds, though it plans to monitor markets closely, Arkady Dvorkovich said in an interview on Bloomberg Television in Moscow. “If market conditions will improve, then the government will start borrowing.”
Russia is bracing for its first recession in a decade, with the Economy Ministry predicting a 2.2 percent contraction this year and a budget deficit of 8 percent of gross domestic product.
Russia’s sovereign debt rating was cut by Standard & Poor’s and Fitch Ratings to their second-lowest investment grades as the central bank spent more than one-third of its foreign currency reserves since August to stem the ruble’s 34 percent decline against the dollar. Russia has about $32 billion of sovereign debt, of which $5.8 billion comes due by the end of 2010, according to the Bank of Russia’s web site.
Dvorkovich said there are “no grounds” to expect further “abrupt” changes in the ruble exchange rate.
 “If commodity prices will not go down sharply,” and the government succeeds in stimulating domestic demand, “we don’t expect the exchange rate will have to be changed,” he said.
The government is also maintaining its forecast of a 2.2 percent contraction this year and an inflation target of less than 14 percent, Dvorkovich said.
Russian companies, which must repay about a quarter of their $400 billion in foreign debt this year, will avoid “large-scale defaults,” Dvorkovich said. “We are sure that most Russian companies will service their debt normally,” he said.
The priority for the government now should be completing the revision of this year’s budget, fighting inflation and stimulating the economy to compensate for falling exports and domestic demand, Dvorkovich said. The government plans to build housing and infrastructure, while offering loan guarantees to consumers, he said.
The government is revising the 2009 budget based on an average oil price of $41 a barrel. The original 2009 budget was based on an average price of $95 a barrel for Urals crude, Russia’s export blend.
The Finance Ministry is “highly likely” to send final budget revisions to the government next week, Dvorkovich said. The budget will probably be sent to parliament with few substantive changes, he said.
Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin said on Wednesday that state spending will increase to 9.5 trillion rubles as Russia provides aid to companies and funds social programs. Budget revenue may decline 31.5 percent from the previous year’s level of 9.3 trillion rubles.
“The bailout isn’t that important now, and we should spend less time on it,” Dvorkovich said.
Russia has disbursed about 800 billion rubles to support the banking system, about 100 billion of which was used to bail out troubled lenders, Dvorkovich said. Most of the support took the form of loans, at “relatively high interest rates,” he said.

TITLE: Opposition Finds Local Poll Hard Going
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The opposition Yabloko Democratic Party on Thursday published a list of the candidates it supports in Sunday’s municipal elections that includes a number of Communists. 
The Yabloko list comprises 71 candidates among the 3,611 seats up for grabs in 27 municipal districts (from a total of 108) in the poll.
“There are even several Communists [on the list], who have joined the coalition with the [preservationist pressure group] Protect Vasilyevsky Ostrov and Yabloko,” Yabloko’s spokesman Alexander Shurshev said by phone on Thursday.
Because many oppositionists were barred from registering as candidates by the authorities under various pretexts, there will mostly be pro-Kremlin candidates standing, with the Kremlin-backed United Russia party fronted by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin dominating in almost all municipal districts.
Yabloko did not offer any official recommendation to pro-opposition voters who might choose to ignore the election or invalidate their ballots, said Shurshev, who was registered as a candidate for Municipality No. 6 in the Primorsky District.
Earlier, Alexander Gnyotov, the chairman of the City Election Committee, said that 973 candidates(around 20 percent) had been barred from participating in the election. 
“I think it is connected to the fact that independent candidates do not always have a responsible attitude toward preparing documents in accordance with every demand of the current law,” he was quoted by Interfax news agency as saying last week. 
Independent candidates, however, have complained that signatures they collected in order to register as such were declared “fabricated” or otherwise invalid by local election committees. Several candidates complained that they had not been let into election committee premises to register, and said they had been told that the committee was “closed.” One said that she saw a long line of old women inside an election committee building who were causing a holdup. They said they were all registering as candidates.
Earlier this month, the local branch of Garry Kasparov’s United Civil Front movement held a protest meeting against the violations they say have occurred during the municipal election campaign. The protesters, who were supported by Yabloko, held posters reading “Enough United Russia,” “Shame on the Election’s Falsifiers” and “I Vote for Independent Candidates.”
As election day approached, several candidates from ecological and preservationist groups in the Yuntolovo municipal district within the Primorsky district saw increased pressure from the authorities when police visited the homes of people who gave their signatures in support of oppositional candidates and asked them questions, Yabloko’s Olga Tsepilova said last week.
On Saturday, three independent candidates were reportedly detained by the police when they were holding an outdoor meeting with voters in the Kalininsky District. They were taken to the police station where they were held for three hours, despite candidates’ immunity from detention.
Candidates Yelena Malysheva of preservationist groups Polyustrovo-43 and Okhtinskaya Duga and Tamara Vedernikova of the Russian Communist Workers Party and the Left Front were approached by the police on Sunday during a similar meeting with voters in the same district.
“They wanted to detain us, but after 90 minutes of arguing they left us alone, although we had to make calls to television journalists [to force the issue],” Malysheva said by phone on Thursday.
Since Yabloko was excluded from elections to the city parliament in January 2007, when a number of signatures the party had collected were declared invalid (“I see the hand of Governor Valentina Matviyenko behind the situation,” Yabloko’s Boris Vishnevsky told The St. Petersburg Times back then), the municipal elections have been seen by opposition parties as the last political process in which independent candidates stand any chance.

TITLE: Experts Unveil Program for Healthy, Affordable Nutrition
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: As the global financial crisis shows little sign of abating, the Russian Nutrition Research Institute and Russian Consumers’ Watchdog, Rospotrebnadzor, have developed a new “economical” nutrition program for different age groups of the population.  
The recommendations in the new program, titled Cheap Healthy Nutrition, are billed as “healthy, tasty, well-balanced and affordable for low-income groups.”
However, scientists and health authorities say that the initiative has less to do with the effect the economic crisis has had on people’s income, and more to do with the recent increase in weight gain and obesity among the population.
According to the new recommendations, children from one to six years old can be fed for 2,034 rubles ($57) a month.  The nutrition program for children in this age group is based on potatoes (6.6 kilograms a month), rye bread (1.6 kilograms a month) and milk (12.5 liters a month). 
Fruits are of course included on the list. Parents are advised to buy 6.6 kilograms a month for 333 rubles ($10).  Judging by current St. Petersburg prices for fruit, the authors of the recommendation presumably have in mind six kilograms of the cheapest ‘Antonovka’ apples or bananas, since other kinds of fruit are considerably more expensive.
In total, children up to six years old should have 1,680 calories a day, according to the report.
Nutrition norms for children between seven and 15 years old are a little more inspiring. Children at the older end of the category are the most privileged on the list, even compared to adult males.  They can have 2,420 calories a day at a cost of 2,804 rubles ($79) a month. 
Men from 16 to 59 years old are advised to ingest 2,700 calories a day at a cost of 2,780 rubles ($78) per month.  Men who like their meat can eat two kilograms of beef for 364 rubles; 670 grams of pork for 126 rubles, and 2.2 kilograms of poultry for 224 rubles a month.
Women of the same age should be more modest with their nutrition, spending 2,353 rubles ($66) a month on 2,140 calories a day.
Like young children, pensioners are also advised to base their diet on potatoes (6.6 kilograms a month), rye bread (3.3 kilograms a month), dairy products, beef and poultry.  They can spend 2,316 rubles ($65) on their meals a month, with a daily intake of 2,100 calories.
In this way, a family of four that includes one child from each age group can feed themselves properly for about 9,300 rubles ($260) a month. 
Research however suggests that average working St. Petersburg residents spend much more on food — from 7,000 to 20,000 rubles a month on nutrition.
Meanwhile, the program proposed by the scientists does not include food like sausages, hot dogs or other fast food or ready meals.  The authors of the program say such products are relatively expensive and not particularly healthy.  
The recommended rations, which include porridge or eggs for breakfast; soup, salad, stewed fruit and steamed cutlets for lunch; and boiled fish with mashed potatoes are mostly meals that require cooking at home.  At the same time, the scientists say that the cooked food should not be saved for long, and that people should act according to the principle ‘cooked and ate.’
 Many have been quick to point out that the cooking of fresh, healthy food requires a considerable amount of time, especially if it should not be kept for long. 
Accordingly, to follow the program, at least one person in the family should not go to work, but should be preparing meals during the day while the other parent works to cover the expenses. Since then the first one would not be receiving a salary, the family would have to economize on food even more. 
Scientists say that people who have recently lost their interest in cooking due to the availability of ready-made food and cafe and restaurant culture should still remember how to cook traditional Russian dishes such as pancakes, fish in jelly, kholodets or meat in jelly, and home made cream.  They should also rely more on home-made preserves, such as pickles, jams, and other food prepared in the summer.
Scientists and the authorities say that the nutrition scheme should finally help Russia’s population to lose excess weight.
Russia’s Head Sanitary Doctor, Gennady Onishchenko, and the director of the Nutrition Institute, Viktor Tutelyan, said in a statement published on the web site of Rospotrebnadzor that in the last ten years, Russia’s citizens have gained an average of two kilograms.
“Even children have gained an extra kilo,” they said.
“Our women are among the leaders in Europe for being overweight,” the statement said.
The number of obese adults in Russia increased from 18 percent in 1994 to 23 percent in 2005, it said.
 “Excess weight and obesity cause a whole range of health problems such as heart disease, diabetes and some forms of cancer that account for the low life expectancy in Russia,” said Onishchenko and Tutelyan.
They said that one of the reasons for this situation was the decline in healthy traditional Russian food culture for imported potato chips, soda and other snacks.
Russian schools recently stopped selling chips, soda, cakes, chewing gum and candy, as well as meat and fish pies as the result of a decree by Onishchenko.
Onishchenko and Tutelyan said that every fourth low-income family had at least one member showing signs of protein and calorie deficiency. They said that the situation was partly caused by ill-advised spending on nutrition. The maximum expenses of such groups are spent on sausage products, which the majority of the population considers not as a snack, but as a meat equivalent.
“Though sausage it is a meat product, it contains only 12-15 percent protein and up to 35 percent fat,” they said. “Meanwhile, in cooked meat there is more than 20 percent meat and only 8-10 percent fat. Real meat also contains much more iron and vitamin B12,” they said.
Onishchenko and Tutelyan called for children to be given more milk instead of soda drinks with high sugar content. The new program advises children of all age groups to drink kefir before going to bed.
This is not the first time nutrition advice has been given in Russian history. Russians were first introduced to home economics and cooking in 1939 when the first edition of the ‘Healthy and Tasty Book’ was published. Back then, the book provoked some vexation because some of the ingredients required for the recipes could not be found in Soviet food stores.

TITLE: In Brief
TEXT: <b>Jewelry Store Robbed</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Unknown armed criminals robbed a jewelry store of goods worth more than five million rubles ($140,000) in St. Petersburg on Tuesday night.
Three men stormed into a ‘585’ chain store on Grazhdansky Prospekt, threatened the saleswomen with a gun, and stole 21 stands of jewelry and accessories, Interfax reported.

<b>Fire Damages Ship</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — The crew of the Dutch cargo ship the Zillertal survived a fire on board the ship in the Gulf of Finland early on Wednesday morning.
The fire broke out in the ship’s machine department when the vessel was located near to Seskar Island.  The crew managed to extinguish the fire themselves, but the ship’s mobility was restricted by the accident.

<b>Arshavin in BMW Story</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Andrei Arshavin, ex-star of FC Zenit and the latest addition to London’s Arsenal will open a BMW sales center together with Moscow’s BaltAutoTrade company in St. Petersburg at the end of March, Voditel Peterburga reported.
BaltAutoTrade has not confirmed the story about Arshavin’s participation. The footballer’s agent, Denis Lakhter, said a friend of Arshavin would be the co-owner of the center, the web site reported.

TITLE: Russia Offers Documents  To Repel Famine Claims
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russia issued a DVD and a thick book of historical documents on Wednesday to dispute claims that the Ukrainian famine of the 1930s amounted to genocide.
Russian archivists and historians pressed the Kremlin’s case that the Stalin-era famine — which killed millions of people — was a common tragedy across Soviet farmlands, countering efforts by Ukraine’s pro-Western president to convince the world that Ukrainians were targeted for starvation.
“Not a single document exists that even indirectly shows that the strategy and tactics chosen for Ukraine differed from those applied to other regions, not to mention tactics or strategy with the aim of genocide,” said Vladimir Kozlov, head of Russia’s Federal Archive Agency.
He said the famine was a direct result of Josef Stalin’s brutal collectivization campaign and the widespread confiscation of grain that was exported to secure equipment needed for the Soviet dictator’s frenetic industrialization drive.
Kozlov said the policy was class-based, targeting the kulaks — wealthy farmers seen as enemies of Communism — and was implemented virtually identically across the Soviet Union.
“There were no national or ethnic undertones,” he told a news conference at the headquarters of state news agency RIA-Novosti.
Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko contends the famine was aimed at rooting out Ukrainian nationalism.
“Hunger was selected as a tool to subdue the Ukrainian people,” he said at a November ceremony marking the anniversary of what Ukrainians consider the onset of the 1932-1933 famine.
Ukrainian lawmakers and a U.S. commission have labeled the famine an act of genocide, and Yushchenko has pushed for more governments and international bodies to follow suit. However, neither the United Nations nor the European Union has done so.
Russian officials have cast the genocide claim as part of an effort by Yushchenko to discredit Russia in he eyes of Ukrainians and the West.
Months before his death last summer, the renowned writer and Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn dismissed the genocide claim as a “fable” that could only fool the West.
On Wednesday, Alexander Dyukov, director of Historical Memory, a Moscow-based foundation that helped organize Wednesday’s news conference, said: “It is aimed, among other things, at inciting ethnic hate, at tearing Ukraine away from Russia.”
Journalists were given an English-language DVD and a 500-page book reproducing documents — some of them recently declassified — that are to be included in a three-volume study of the famine in the U.S.S.R. from 1929 to 1934.
They include letters portraying the dire situation at the time in what is now Russia and in other ex-Soviet republics and orders — some with Stalin’s stamped signature in red ink — denying pleas for a letup in grain procurement quotas. Other documents suggest officials in Ukraine misled Moscow about the extent of hunger there.
The famine’s death toll is disputed, but it is widely believed that it killed between three million and seven million people in Ukraine.

TITLE: Iran Tests Nuclear Power Plant
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BUSHEHR, Iran — Iranian and Russian officials began a test run of Iran’s first nuclear plant on Wednesday, a major step toward beginning full operations at the facility, which has long raised concerns from the United States and its allies over Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
The pilot operations at the 1,000-megawatt light-water reactor, built with Russian assistance under a $1 billion contract, have long been delayed over construction and supply glitches.
It’s unclear when the reactor could be switched on. Test runs normally occur a few months before a reactor’s startup.
Wednesday’s tests were a computer run to ensure that the reactor’s processes work properly. For the tests, technicians loaded a “virtual fuel” of lead into the reactor to imitate the density of enriched uranium, said Iranian nuclear spokesman Mohsen Shirazi.
The aim is to run the equipment and ensure that there are no malfunctions when actual enriched uranium fuel is put in. No electricity is produced during the testing.
“This [test] is one of the major elements of an extensive project,” he said. 
Once the virtual fuel is in place, “we will check to see how the reactor will operate,” said Rosatom chief Sergei Kiriyenko, who was inspecting the process.
The plant, which will run on enriched uranium imported from Russia, has worried the West because the spent fuel could later be turned into plutonium, potential material for nuclear warheads.
U.S. concerns over the reactor softened somewhat after Iran agreed to return spent fuel to Russia to ensure that Tehran does not reprocess it into plutonium. Russia’s fuel deliveries to Iran began in 2007.
The Bushehr reactor was initially to start in 2008, and some 700 Iranian engineers were trained in Russia over four years to operate the plant.

TITLE: Estonian Given 12 Years For Passing Secrets to Moscow
TEXT: TALLINN, Estonia — An Estonian court convicted a former top security official of treason Wednesday for passing domestic and NATO secrets to Russia, the Baltic country’s biggest espionage scandal since the Cold War. 
Herman Simm, the former head of security at the Estonian Defense Ministry, was sentenced to 12 years and six months in prison in a trial that was kept secret until the verdict was announced Wednesday. 
The Harju County Court did not specify which country the 61-year-old handed the secrets to, but investigators later said he passed on nearly 3,000 documents to Russia. 
“Starting from 1995 until his arrest in 2008, Herman Simm collected and forwarded classified Estonian and NATO information — hundreds of pages — to the Russian foreign intelligence service,” said Norman Aas, Estonia’s chief prosecutor. “Also, he passed on personal information on some Estonian individuals, something that may damage Estonia’s interests.” 
Most of the documents concerned Estonia’s defense policy, defense systems and foreign relations, but they also included information on NATO communication systems, investigators said, adding they have been working with the alliance on the case. Estonia joined NATO in 2004. 
In a brief statement, the court said Simm was also sentenced to pay 20.2 million kroons ($1.7 million) in damages to the Estonian Defense Ministry. 
Prosecutors said Simm pleaded guilty and cooperated during the investigation. In return, they didn’t seek the maximum 15-year sentence. 
Security Police chief Raivo Aeg and prosecutor Lavly Lepp said Simm, who climbed the ranks of Estonia’s police force in the early 1990s, started working for the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, or SVR, when he joined the Defense Ministry in 1995. 
The Kremlin has denied any involvement with Simm. 
Simm was trained at the Interior Ministry Academy, which in the Cold War era had links with the KGB. A year later he switched to the Defense Ministry, where he eventually became head of a security unit.

TITLE: Tax Returns to Attract Closer Scrutiny
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russian government officials and their families will be required to provide more detailed information about assets and income when they file their taxes this year as part of a push to combat corruption.
 “The new tax forms will be more specific and expanded,” Arkady Dvorkovich, an economic adviser to President Dmitry Medvedev, said in an interview in Moscow on Thursday. “We’re not out for anyone’s blood, but it’s important that people work well.” Medvedev, a lawyer by training, has made the fight against what he called “legal nihilism” a priority of his presidency and has called corruption a threat to national security.
Prosecutor General Yury Chaika said Wednesday that 280,000 violations of Russian anti-corruption laws were uncovered in 2008, twice as many as a year earlier, and prosecutors opened 3,300 criminal investigations. Bribery cases increased 7.5 percent, he said.

TITLE: Russia’s Passport Policy Stirs Fear Among Neighbors
AUTHOR: By Gary Peach and Maria Danilova
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: TIRASPOL, Moldova — Retired postal worker Maria Kozyrenko is a new citizen of Russia — along with 135,000 others in Transdnestr alone. 
Kozyrenko hasn’t lived in Russia since the Soviet era. But she got her passport two years ago as part of the Kremlin’s push to grant citizenship to hundreds of thousands of ethnic Russians living in former Soviet countries, including Georgia, Moldova, Estonia and Ukraine. 
“All our hopes are with Russia,” said Kozyrenko, as she hawked an old black coat at a flea market in Tiraspol, the capital of Transdnestr. “We hope that Russia will protect us.” 
Russia has given passports to nearly 2.9 million former Soviet citizens since 2000, according to the Federal Migration Service. It does not break down the numbers between those who returned to Russia and those who still live abroad. 
Some fear that Moscow will use its growing expatriate communities to meddle in the domestic politics of countries near its borders, or — as in the case of Georgia — as an excuse for military intervention. But the Kremlin says it is granting passports to Russians abroad for humanitarian rather than political reasons, to help Russians trapped in other countries after the breakup of the Soviet Union. 
Kremlin spokesman Alexei Sazonov pointed out that Western countries, such as Belgium, have conducted similar campaigns in the past. 
“We have a nonconfrontational foreign policy — we don’t need any conflicts,” Sazonov said. “At the same time to defend the rights of compatriots is a right countries have.” 
The creation of communities of Russian citizens is already undermining Ukraine’s entry into NATO and weakening Moldova as it looks to Europe. It also lets the West know that Russia wants to be reckoned with in what it considers its sphere of influence. 
“This is a warning, a serious reminder that there are grounds for concern for those who don’t recognize Russia’s interests,” said Masha Lipman, an analyst with the Carnegie Moscow Center. 
For example, in recent years the Kremlin has handed out tens of thousands of passports in the breakaway Georgian regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. It then in part justified its military incursion into Georgia last year by saying it was protecting Russians living abroad. Now, both South Ossetia and Abkhazia have strengthened political, economic and military ties with Moscow.
Similarly, the Kremlin subsidizes Moldova’s separatist province of Transdnestr with cheap gas, funds pro-Russian youth movements and pays poor pensioners a monthly $10 addition to their pensions of $60 to $70. 
“For Transdnestr, Russia is like the closest and dearest person — it’s like our motherland,” said Alyona Arshinova, 23, a new Russian citizen and activist with a youth group sponsored by pro-Kremlin lawmakers in Russia. Posters of President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin adorn her college dormitory room. 
About one-fourth of Transdnestr’s 550,000 people have already received Russian citizenship. And Transdnestr leader Igor Smirnov, who has ruled this sliver of land since 1991, makes no secret that he wants the region to become part of Russia, even though the two don’t share a border. 

Estonia’s Noncitizens 
Another flash point is Estonia. The Russian Embassy in the capital, Tallinn, said about 3,700 passports were issued in the 12 months before Oct. 30, 2008 — more than three times the number during the same period a year earlier. 
This is partly because Estonia, a member of the European Union and NATO, has made clear that it is nervous about its large ethnic Russian population. Denied automatic citizenship after Estonia’s independence in 1991, many of these Russians are so-called “noncitizens” who must pass a language exam before receiving an Estonian passport. 
A lot don’t bother because of the time and expense of studying the grammatically complex Estonian language. For them, a Russian passport is just as enticing, if not more so. Immigration numbers show more than 96,200 Russian citizens and 111,700 noncitizens living in Estonia. 
Residents of Narva, a predominantly ethnic Russian city in northeastern Estonia, said that if they hold a Russian passport and an Estonian noncitizen’s passport they can travel from Lisbon, Portugal, to Vladivostok without a visa. 
“I finally made up my mind — I’m going to get Russian citizenship,” said Vitaly Shkola, 47, an Estonian noncitizen. 
Russians with Estonian passports are considered “second-class citizens,” he said. 
For some the choice of citizenship boils down to economics. Vasily Kaidalov, 21, applied for a Russian passport because he can earn more working in Russia than in his destitute hometown. 

10% of Ukrainians 
In Ukraine, officials claim that Russia is rapidly distributing passports in the Crimea Peninsula, the location of a major Russian naval base. The Crimea was long a jewel in the Russian imperial crown but was given to Ukraine by Nikita Khrushchev in the 1950s. 
Many influential Russian politicians, such as Mayor Yury Luzhkov, believe that Khrushchev’s decision was illegal and Russia is duty-bound to repossess Crimea. 
Mustafa Dzhemilev, a member of Ukraine’s parliament from the Crimean Peninsula, estimated that about 200,000 people — or nearly every 10th resident — has dual Russian-Ukrainian citizenship, although it is prohibited by law. 
In Ukraine, Russia is “trying to do the same thing they did with Abkhazia and South Ossetia — establish legal grounds, at least in the Russian legal system, for intervention, whether that be economic, political or military,” said Peter Zeihan, vice president of analysis at Stratfor, an international intelligence and analysis company. 
Many remain convinced that Russia’s true motive in handing out passports outside its borders has to do with politics and power. 
“If there are some 200,000 Russian citizens living in Estonia, Russia will have the basis to intervene,” said Sergei Stepanov, an ethnic Russian resident of Narva and noncitizen. “Who will stop them?”

TITLE: 500,000 Workers To Lose Jobs
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: The number of Russians set to lose their jobs amid the global financial crisis has reached half a million, jumping tenfold in less than four months, according to data released by the Health and Social Development Ministry.
The figures demonstrate how deeply the economic turmoil has penetrated into the real economy, affecting not only financial professionals, as was largely the case in October, but everyone from store clerks to construction workers.
As of Feb. 18, the Health and Social Development Ministry had classified 496,600 workers as “due for redundancy” — meaning job cuts notified to the government but not yet enacted.
Wages and real disposable income are also plummeting, while wages owed to workers have almost tripled since last year, government data showed.
Real wages fell 26.7 percent in January compared with December and 9.1 percent compared to January of 2008.
At the same time, real disposable income dropped 45.7 percent month on month and 6.7 percent year on year, the State Statistics Service said.
The Health and Social Development Ministry’s data showed that wage arrears had ballooned to nearly 7 billion rubles ($195.2 million) as of Feb. 1, 2 1/2 times higher than at the start of 2008.
The ministry, which presented its labor report on Tuesday, showed that some of the biggest regions of European Russia had been the worst affected, including Moscow and St. Petersburg.

TITLE: Olimpstroi Doesn’t Need State Funding
AUTHOR: By Maria Antonova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Kozak said Tuesday that state corporation Olimpstroi would not need state funding in 2009 and that most of the previously allocated money would be returned to the federal budget. 
“The 49 billion rubles [$1.4 billion] set aside in the federal budget for this year will not be allotted to the corporation. The corporation can carry out all of its tasks using its balance carried over,” Kozak said, Interfax reported. 
Two-thirds of this amount will be redirected into the federal budget, while the remaining third will be allocated to infrastructure development projects, he said at a government meeting on preparations for the Olympic Games. 
Olimpstroi president Viktor Kolodyazhny said the company had a balance of about 73 billion rubles from previous allocations, 63 billion rubles of which would be used in 2009. 
The government is facing a budget deficit for 2009 projected at 2.2 percent of gross domestic product by the Economic Development Ministry, and newspapers reported last week that it was in discussions with state corporations, including Olimpstroi and Rosnano, on using planned allocations to cover holes in the budget. 
A total of 127 billion rubles had been allocated for Olympic spending in 2009, but the government announced last week that the budget for construction projects would be cut by 15 percent because of the cheaper cost of materials. 
The state is also seeking to cut spending on Olympic projects by attracting investors to fund venue construction. Olimpstroi extended the deadlines for tenders on two such projects last week on renewed investor interest. 
A total of four venues worth 22 billion rubles will be presented to investors by March 1, Kozak said. 
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said at the meeting that only 20 percent of the Olympic budget would be spent on sports venues, while the remaining 80 percent will be used to develop the region’s infrastructure. 
While the government has become a less reliable source of funding for the Olympics, the private sector has been stepping up and has already pledged millions of dollars in sponsorship. 
The Sochi Organizing Committee said last Thursday that Rosneft would become the games’ general sponsor, having secured a pledge of $180 million dollars from the state-run oil giant. 
Rosneft president Sergei Bogdanchikov, who signed the sponsorship agreement along with committee chairman Dmitry Chernyshenko, called support of the Sochi Games “profitable for the company,” according to the joint press release. 
Rosneft also said in the statement that it would be building 150 new gasoline stations, half of which would be in the Krasnodar region, in conjunction with the Olympics. 
Earlier this month, Rostelecom and MegaFon jointly pledged $460 million to the Olympic Games, $200 million of which will be used to develop regional infrastructure. 
Contests are still open for official sponsorship rights for gas, metals and clothing and shoes firms. All bids are in, however, for the right to be the official banking sponsor of the games, and the winner will be announced soon, the committee said Tuesday.

TITLE: Third of Arms Makers Face Bankruptcy
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: One-third of Russia’s weapons makers are on the verge of bankruptcy, and the industry is seeking Western loans because domestic credit is impossibly expensive, Russian Technologies head Sergei Chemezov said Wednesday.
“The financial and economic condition of only 36 percent of strategic organizations in the military industrial complex can be seen as stable,” Chemezov told lawmakers.
“About 30 percent of organizations [in the military industrial sector] have signs of bankruptcy,” he said, adding that about half of the enterprises in the ammunition and explosives sector were “potentially bankrupt.”
“Unfortunately, over the past four months the situation has only become worse,” he said.
Chemezov said interest rates being offered by Russian banks were far too high and that he was in talks with Western banks. 
“Credit is the most painful topic. With such high interest rates, we are simply unable to develop industry,” he said.
“In the end, we will have to get these credits in the West, and we are holding talks because the cost of credit there is much less, several times less,” he said.
A spokesman for Russian Technologies declined to name the Western banks involved or the sums being discussed.
Russian Technologies is a special state corporation that includes the assets of state arms exporter Rosoboronexport and has stakes in carmaker AvtoVAZ and VSMPO-Avisma, the world’s largest titanium maker.
Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov told State Duma deputies on Wednesday that demand was tumbling by as much as 50 percent to 70 percent in some sectors. 
“We can characterize the current industrial situation as a crisis of demand,” he said.
Russian arms exports hit a record $8.35 billion in 2008, though industry officials have long warned that major investment is needed in research and productive capacity.
Some major clients, such as India, have complained about late deliveries on major orders, while Algeria returned 15 MiG fighters last year, saying they contained some substandard parts.

TITLE: Sochi Committee Invites Bids From Airlines and Insurers
AUTHOR: By Maria Antonova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The Sochi Organizing Committee said Wednesday that it had created two new sponsorship categories — for an insurer and an airline — and that it sent bid invitations to Russia’s largest players in each sector.
Ingosstrakh, the country’s largest insurer, had not received an invitation, vice president Ilya Solomatin said Wednesday evening. The company will need to look at possible risks before it considers becoming a partner, he said. 
“It’s questionable whether one insurance company, even a big one, can adequately provide comprehensive insurance services at the Olympics,” he said, adding that several Russian companies would do a better job.
Aeroflot and S7, the country’s two largest airlines, did not respond to questions on whether they would bid.
The committee’s press service said Wednesday that it expected 10 general partners for the 2014 Olympics, although it declined to say what other categories might be added. There are now eight categories, which will each have one winner. The exception is telecoms, where MegaFon and Rostelecom have already been chosen.
Vedomosti reported Wednesday that Sberbank had been picked in the banking category and that its contract could be as much as $130 million. The committee declined comment on the report, and Sberbank did not respond to written questions.
With the possible Sberbank sum, the total amount of corporate money pledged by Russian firms will have topped $750 million. The sponsorship program aims to raise 75 percent of the games’ operational budget, initially set at $1.5 billion. The remainder is subsidized by the Russian government.

TITLE: In Brief
TEXT: <b>Glavstroi-SPB Sold</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (Bloomberg) — Russian billionaire Suleiman Kerimov bought the St. Petersburg-based unit of fellow billionaire Oleg Deripaska’s builder Glavstroi, Vedomosti reported, citing a person it didn’t identify.
Glavstroi-SPB is developing four property projects in St. Petersburg for a combined 6 million square meters (65 million square feet) that need about 200 billion rubles ($5.59 billion) of investments, the newspaper said. Deripaska’s companies have accumulated more than $25 billion in debt, according to Vedomosti.

<b>Oil Firms Win on Ruble</b>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Russian oil companies will receive 800 billion rubles ($22 billion) in 2009 as a result of the ruble devaluation, Interfax said, citing Russian Minister of Finance Alexei Kudrin.
Oil companies have asked for 500 billion rubles in tax breaks, Interfax said, citing Kudrin speaking to officials from the Federal Tax Service outside Moscow.
Russian oil companies receive dollars for exports and pay rubles for services inside Russia.

<b>Tea, Fish Prices Increase</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (Bloomberg) — Russia’s inflation rate in the year through Feb. 24 accelerated to 3.6 percent as tea and frozen fish prices rose.
Consumer prices grew 0.4 percent between Feb. 17 and Feb. 24, the Moscow-based Federal Statistics Service said on its web site Thursday. Last year, prices increased 3.4 percent in the year through the same period.
The cost of tea grew 1.9 percent, frozen fish prices advanced 1.4 percent and powdered milk for infants added 0.9 percent, according to the statement. Gasoline prices fell 0.7 percent and diesel fuel slid 0.5 percent.

<b>Sugar Inquest Over</b>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Last month’s price increase by Russian white sugar producers is “seasonal,” the country’s antitrust watchdog said, ending an investigation that halted any increase in import duties.
Russian sugar plants raised wholesale prices because the ruble’s devaluation, higher seasonal tariffs and more expensive loans pushed up the cost of importing the raw product, the Federal Antimonopoly Service said on its web site Thursday. The watchdog opened the probe in January.
The Russian government on Jan. 30 delayed a decision on raising duties on raw-sugar imports to $180 a metric ton from $140 because of the investigation. 

<b>Naftogaz Seeks Revision</b>
KIEV (Bloomberg) — Naftogaz Ukrainy, Ukraine’s state-run energy company, wants changes to the natural gas agreement with Russia as it seeks to cut fuel imports by an additional 18 percent this year.
Naftogaz, based in Kiev, wants to buy 33 billion cubic meters of gas from Russia, down from a previous plan to buy 40 billion cubic meters, Bohdan Sokolovskyi, an energy policy aide to President Viktor Yushchenko, said Thursday in an e-mail. The country imported about 48 billion cubic meters last year.

TITLE: Russia Is Much Smarter This Time
AUTHOR: By Yevgeny Bazhanov
TEXT: Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong loved to say, “The world’s two superpowers, the Soviet Union and United States, collide and collude, and the more they collide, the more they collude.” By all accounts, Mao’s interpretation of relations between Moscow and Washington is still relevant today under Barack Obama’s presidency.
Obama, who campaigned under the slogan “Change We Can Believe In,” is serious about making fundamental changes to U.S. foreign policy, including its relations with Russia. To be sure, George W. Bush’s hegemonic, unipolar approach to global affairs conflicts with Obama’s basic political beliefs. Obama is not driven by “democratic fundamentalism” or neoconservatism, nor does he have the same close ties to the military-industrial complex, intelligence agencies or Texas oil magnates. What’s more, the roughly 65 million Americans who voted for Obama are expecting him to institute real changes to U.S. foreign policy. 
Regardless of Obama’s convictions and background, the new global architecture would have objectively required the White House to change its foreign policy in any case following Bush’s legacy. Even going back to the two U.S. administrations preceding Bush, the United States’ global status was heavily boosted by one external factor — the internal dissolution and voluntary capitulation of its arch rival, the Soviet Union — although it didn’t stop Americans from rejoicing that they “won” the Cold War. 
Before the economic crisis, the United States was undoubtedly much stronger than any of its competitors. This inflated the perception in the Bush administration that the United States was the shining star of the civilized world — the singular superpower with a moral mission to bring freedom and prosperity to other nations. Now, of course, these illusions have been shattered as the crisis has delivered a significant blow to the U.S. economy and its overly ambitious foreign policy agenda. 
But this by no means implies that the Obama administration will give up the U.S. position as the dominant global leader. There has never been a case in history when the strongest, richest and most-developed nation in the world voluntarily gave up its predominant position, and Obama will certainly be no exception to this axiom. Although U.S. global ambitions will be less aggressive and messianic than during the two Bush terms, the United States will still continue to compete for prominent global leadership. This means that there will inevitably be more collisions with other leading powers, including Russia, which are unwilling to accept the diminutive role as “junior partner” to Washington. The other main centers of power — Russia, China and Europe — all have equally legitimate claims to global leadership. 
In addition, economic factors will continue to be the driving force that shapes U.S. foreign policy. The United States will continue to compete for dominance in foreign markets, and the battle for control of energy resources and delivery routes will be particularly heated. This will undoubtedly lead to conflixts with other competing powers. 
It is important not to forget that the military-industrial complex remains a key factor behind Washington’s aggressive foreign policy. Generals at the Pentagon have access to huge stockpiles of arms — including state-of-the-art weapons and technology untested in real battle conditions, which they are itching to use. Therefore, the constant need to create enemies — and provoke fights with them — will remain. 
Thus, Obama will be bogged down in a complex, self-contradictory battle between a new global reality of multipolarity and old hegemonic baggage that the United States can’t completely get rid of. It is therefore understandable why Russia, which was burned badly by its blind euphoria with the United States in the early 1990s, will be skeptical about Obama’s lofty promises of a fundamental change in U.S. foreign policy.
Although there are many opportunities to expand U.S.-Russian cooperation — particularly in nuclear nonproliferation and fighting terrorism in Afghanistan — conflicts between Moscow and Washington in the former Soviet republics are virtually inescapable. The United States, motivated by superpower ambitions and cold geopolitical calculations, will continue to embrace and support anti-Russian leaders in Georgia, Ukraine and other former Soviet republics. Russia will never come to terms with the American eagle sinking its talons into Russia’s backyard. There can never be normal U.S.-Russian relations as long as this continues. 
The current U.S.-Russian standoff in some ways is even worse than during the Cold War. From 1945 to 1991, Europe was sharply divided into two distinct zones of influence. During this period, Moscow and Washington did not cross into each other’s backyard but collided in proxy battles in faraway places, such as in Vietnam, Congo and Yemen. (Afghanistan, which bordered the Soviet Union, was an exception.) The situation is completely different today, when the battle line runs right along Russian borders. 
The United States will face serious problems as it attempts to strengthen its position globally. Washington will have to make tough — and dangerous — decisions on the Middle East, Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan that will harden existing anti-U.S. sentiment in those regions.
We welcome the first positive signals coming from the Obama administration, but at the same time we don’t feed ourselves with illusions that we there will be paradise under the new U.S. president. After the Cold War came to an end, we were all caught up in the same wave of optimism that quickly turned into deep disappointment. This time around, we won’t be so naive.

Yevgeny Bazhanov is vice chancellor at the Foreign Ministry’s Diplomatic Academy.

TITLE: Amnesia and Negligence in Politkovskaya Case
AUTHOR: By Yulia Latynina
TEXT: Last week, a jury acquitted three defendants in the murder trial of Novaya Gazeta journalist Anna Politkovskaya. The newspaper’s deputy editor Sergei Sokolov said, “We insist that the defendants were guilty. The investigators were simply prevented from doing their job properly.” 
Politically motivated murders are committed in other countries, of course. After all, John F. Kennedy’s killer was never found. But in Russia, as always, anything goes. Only in Russia could the chief murder suspect, Rustam Makhmudov, avoid prosecution despite the fact that he apparently arrived at the crime scene in his own car and entered Politkovskaya’s apartment building wearing his own coat, which was captured on the video surveillance camera near the building entrance.
Those who ordered the murder are obviously happy with the verdict. But there is another group that is also content: certain members of the liberal opposition who take joy whenever the government reveals its gross negligence and incompetence.
What went wrong in the case? If the murderers were complete strangers to those who ordered the contract killing, it would have been easy to sacrifice those who pulled the trigger and lock them away for life. But the killers were too closely related to the organizers of the crime, and in order to protect the identity of the latter it was necessary to release the former. And this is why the case collapsed.
At Novaya Gazeta, where I am a columnist, we believe that there were two key figures behind the Politkovskaya murder. The first was Shamil Burayev, the former head of Chechnya’s Achkhoy-Martanovsky district. The second was Burayev’s close acquaintance, Lom-Ali Gaitukayev, reported leader of the Lazansky gang that specializes in narcotics and contract killings.
It is possible that Burayev had prior dealings with Gaitukayev. In 2004, it was allegedly members of the Lazansky group who killed Yan Sergunin, the first deputy prime minister of Chechnya. Sergunin had lent money to Burayev for his election campaign. Therefore, when Sergunin was killed, Burayev no longer had to pay that money back. 
To solve the mystery of who ordered the killing, the lawyers for Politkovskaya’s family could have started by taking a closer look at who Burayev and Gaitukayev had dealings with. The investigation revealed ample evidence, and for anyone who knows how things are done in Chechnya, it is quite clear who stands behind this crime.
The 12-member jury unanimously acquitted Gaitukayev’s two nephews — Dzhabrail and Ibragim Makhmudov — who were also the younger brothers of the suspected triggerman, Rustam Makhmudov. According to the prosecutors’ charges, Dzhabrail drove Rustam to the crime scene and Ibragim called him when Politkovskaya’s car passed by. 
During the trial, the Makhmudov brothers “did not remember” Ibragim’s phone number. They also “did not remember” that they owned the car identified at the crime scene, nor could they recall what they were doing for 1 1/2 hours at the murder scene. But most amazing was they “did not remember” that they have an older brother named Rustam in whose apartment they lived.
Thanks to the brilliant performance by defense attorney Murad Musayev and the passive position of the Politkovskaya family’s lawyers, the accused were acquitted. So now the lawyers representing the Politkovskaya family will appeal to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg and argue that the case wasn’t properly investigated by the prosecutor’s office. Good luck. As if the European Court will find the killers.

Yulia Latynina hosts a political talk show on Ekho Moskvy radio.

TITLE: Onegin online
AUTHOR: By Olga Sharapova
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: On Tuesday, the Alexandriinsky Theater will host the eagerly anticipated world premiere of local choreographer Boris Eifman’s new ballet, “Onegin. Online,” based on Alexander Pushkin’s classic novel in verse “Yevgeny Onegin.” 
The performance will be the only one in the city in the near future. The next is planned after the return of the award-winning St. Petersburg State Academic Ballet Theater of Boris Eifman from a tour of the U.S. this summer. 
“Onegin. Online” is the third part of a trilogy of Eifman ballets based on Russian literary classics, having been preceded by “Anna Karenina,” based on Lev Tolstoy’s novel, and “The Seagull,” based on Chekhov’s play. 
Eifman explained the concept of his new work last week at a press conference dedicated to the premiere. 
“When we bring to the stage works of great drama and classic literature, we are following in Jean-Georges Noverre’s tradition, when ballet was about performing serious works of literature and drama,” he said.  “For me, it is very important to reflect the spirit of the time and the emotional world of Tolstoy or Chekhov. 
“Yevgeny Onegin” portrays the careless lifestyle of a young dandy, Yevgeny Onegin, (played here by Oleg Gabyshev) who rejects a provincial girl named Tatyana (Maria Abashova), only to regret his choice when he meets her again several years later. The novel was described by Pushkin’s contemporary, the critic Belinsky, as “an encyclopedia of Russian life.”
Psychology and philosophy feature heavily in Eifman’s repertoire, which includes “Tchaikovsky,” “Russian Hamlet,” “Red Giselle” and “The Karamazovs.” “Onegin. Online” is no exception.
“In my ballets I try to create dance that is full of expression, and emphasize the psychology behind human nature through movement,” he said. “Let’s talk about Tatyana’s dream in ‘Yevgeny Onegin.’  In my opinion, this is a brilliant example of profound psychoanalysis of the female subconscious done by Pushkin long before Freud’s system of interpreting dreams. But my main goal as a choreographer is to explore the phenomenon of the Russian soul, as something special in art.  Is it still alive, or can’t we find qualities such as warmth and particular emotionalism in people anymore?” he said.
To explore this issue, Eifman decided to transport Pushkin’s heroes from the early 19th century to the 1990s, the most controversial and complex period of Russia’s post-Soviet history. 
A recurring idea in the literature of Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Chekhov and others is that of the “superfluous man,” for whom the character of Yevgeny Onegin is arguably a prototype. Eifman said that after perestroika Russia lost a lot of talented people, and the state of the country now is very close to the basic idea of “Yevgeny Onegin.”  The title of the ballet, “Onegin. Online” reflects the idea that the main character is a real hero of our time and could be among us now, he said. 
Eifman, whose musical scores have famously included Pink Floyd, uses two musical themes in “Onegin. Online”: Tchaikovsky’s opera “Yevgeny Onegin,” and music by the Russian rock group Autograph, which was popular in the 1990s.  This unlikely musical combination promises an original take on Pushkin’s novel and modern ballet. Unsurprisingly, there is a great deal of excitement surrounding Tuesday’s premiere.  
Eifman said that almost all of the tickets for the premiere had already been sold. It is notoriously difficult to obtain tickets for Eifman’s work in St. Petersburg, partly due to the fact that the ballet troupe, despite its success at home and abroad, does not have its own theater and is obliged to rent different theaters for all its performances. 
This problem looks set to be solved soon however, since a purpose-built theater is planned for the troupe as part of the “European Embankment” project, in which the district around Prospekt Dobrolyubova on the Petrograd Side will be redeveloped. The project includes the construction of a business and cultural center, at the core of which will be a Palace of Dance — a large theater and school where three ballet troupes will rehearse and perform, including the Boris Eifman Ballet Theater. The other two troupes will be a classical troupe and an experimental group of stage performers and choreographers who are devoted to searching for new forms of ballet. As one of the initiators of the construction of the Palace of Dance, Eifman’s idea was first and foremost for a creative and noncommercial project.  
The first major stage of the theater project has already been completed with the creation of a modern multimedia center, which makes it possible to record and thus preserve all aspects of theatrical life, from rehearsals to performances. 
“I must confess that even for me, it is a great secret how a ballet grows from the first vague plans and is transformed into a real performance,” said Eifman. “I am very glad that we have got the opportunity to create a full professional archive and creative laboratory at our theater,” he said.  
The multimedia center cost more than 13 million rubles ($364,000), and was built using a grant from the Cultural Support and Investment Fund, in addition to 600,000 rubles ($17,000) provided by Eifman’s troupe itself. The theater was awarded the grant after winning a competition within the Economic Development of St. Petersburg Project, which is funded by the local and national governments and the International Bank of Reconstruction and Development. 
The much-anticipated premiere of “Onegin. Online” will be recorded by the new theatrical multimedia center’s photographers, ensuring that those who are unable to watch it live on Tuesday will be able to watch it on the Internet or at the multimedia center.

TITLE: Chernov's Choice
TEXT: The Kremlin has grown strangely susceptible to pop music in the past few weeks. Earlier this month, Vladimir Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov denied claims that <b>Bjorn Again</b>, a London-based ABBA tribute band, put on a secret show for the prime minister. 
He even went as far as presenting Putin as a Beatles fan, although Peskov did not object when, as president, Putin was described as a fan of Smokie, another cheesy 1970s band which performed at a Kremlin party in December 2004. (Back then, Sergei Ivanov, the then Defense Minister, wore the mantle of a Beatles fan in a Paul McCartney documentary.)
Then last week, the Kremlin got upset about a Georgian pop band using the English phrase “put in” in a song that the band is planning to perform at the Eurovision Song Contest in Moscow in May.
Called “Put In” and featuring the lines “We don’t wanna put in, The negative move/Is killin’ the groove,” the song, which is performed by Stefane & 3G, enraged the Kremlin so much that Peskov made a new statement, accusing the musicians of “pseudo-political ambitions, or simply speaking, hooliganism.”
This week, <b>Vakhtang Kikabidze</b>, Georgia’s best-known and best-loved crooner during the Soviet and post-Soviet era, reacted to Russia’s 2008 invasion of Georgia with a song and a video. Called “You Didn’t Betray Me; You Disillusioned Me,”  the Russian-language song is a tragic romance about love-gone-bad in form. However, on video it features ruthless footage from the war and is a clear message from the Georgian singer to Russia.
Kikabidze, who was due to mark his 70th birthday with two concerts at the Kremlin Palace, canceled them as a protest against Russia’s actions, announced this week that his 70th birthday concert will take place later next month — not in Moscow but in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine. Any comment from Peskov?
Luckily, the Kremlin does not follow St. Petersburg’s music scene so closely or it might have been upset by posters for a concert by art-rock band <b>NOM</b>. 
The posters, which can be seen in town this week, show a bear — the symbol of the Kremlin-backed and Putin-fronted United Russia party — adding “just another brick” to a very Pink Floydesque wall. 
NOM will perform its new concert set called “A Brick Into the Stomach” at Glavclub on Saturday.
The poster is the work of NOM artist <b>Nikolai Kopeikin</b>, whose works are also currently on display at the Central Manege Exhibition Hall (see Galleries listing on page 9). The exhibition will run through Sunday.

<i>— By Sergey Chernov</i>

TITLE: A Thousand Buddhas
AUTHOR: By Elmira Alieva
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The vast region of Central Asia, stretching from the Caspian Sea to central China, has always been one of the most mysterious and tempting corners of the world. It is this huge territory that became known as the Silk Road — an extensive network of trade routes between East and West that lured merchants with the fat profits to be made. The Silk Road influenced the history of the world and produced numerous artifacts, a vast collection of which is now on display at the State Hermitage Museum in an exhibition entitled “The Caves of A Thousand Buddhas: Russian exhibitions on the Silk Road.”
“We gave this name to the exhibition because the central point of Mahayana Buddhism, a term for classifying Buddhist philosophies and practice, is the great number of Buddhas,” said Dr. Olga Deshpande, senior researcher at the State Hermitage Museum and the curator of the exhibition. “This idea is embodied in the art of Central Asia. Countless numbers of cave temples are painted with numerous Buddhas, which is the visual presentation of this oriental doctrine. So, ‘The Caves of A Thousand Buddhas’ is a metaphorical name,” she explained.
The State Hermitage Museum spent several years preparing for the exhibition together with the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The exhibition consists of 330 objects found by Russian explorers in East Turkistan during the course of expeditions at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. 
“East Turkistan is the name that Russian explorers gave to the present-day Xinjiang (Sinjan) Uygur district of China,” said Deshpande. “In the 19th century this territory, with all its deserts, oases and unknown culture held great attraction for European expeditions.”
The exhibition allows visitors to see valuable pieces of art, including sculpture, fragments of wall paintings, woodcuts, expedition documents, photographs and maps as well as precious manuscripts, which cover a thousand years of history from the fourth to the 14th centuries. Although the remarkable collection of Silk Road art came to the Hermitage in the 1930s, many exhibits are on display for the first time, and some of them have been completely restored.
“There are unique objects, such as icons from Dunhuang and Turfan, a famous two-headed Buddha, ancient xylographic manuscripts written in 13 styles of writing and 14 languages, wall paintings, water colors and traced copies of ancient paintings that were made by expedition painters,” said Deshpande. Among the other outstanding exhibits are examples of Tangut manuscripts from the ruined city of Khara-Khoto, and manuscripts from the huge library at the Dunhuang monastery, which was discovered at the beginning of the 20th century.
The exhibits combine features of Chinese art, such as a brightness of color and accuracy in positioning figures in a space, with traditions of Central Asian culture. “The common foundation for all the objects is Buddhism,” said Deshpande. “The population of Central Asia was under the influence of Buddhism for many centuries, and this influence was represented visually in their culture. It is true that people in Central Asia were of different origins; they spoke different languages and had their own cultural characteristics, but they were all united by the broad and diverse Buddhist culture,” she added.
 “The Caves of a Thousand Buddhas: Russian Expeditions on the Silk Road” runs at the State Hermitage Museum through April 5.

TITLE: Bella Italia
AUTHOR: By Shura Collinson
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Don’t be put off by the troika of intimidating giants guarding the entrance to Francesco, nor by the large poster advertising this weekend’s Mixed Martial Arts competition (bare fist fighting, no rules) just behind them. The poster can be explained by the fact that the competition is sponsored by Ginza Project, who have added to their string of local up-market eateries with the opening of this Italian restaurant. The sentinels, who were unfailingly courteous, can be explained by the fact that — well, this is Ginza Project. 
It was a little less clear why there was a plastic frame containing an advertisement — complete with a pouch of business cards — for a seemingly unrelated construction company on every otherwise charmingly decorated table. Aside from this random lapse, Francesco is very aesthetically pleasing, with its wooden floor and ceiling, low lighting and candles, abundance of plants and copper furnishings and a cozy banquette lining one wall of the first floor. An upright piano, display cabinets full of crockery and stacks of empty wine bottles enhance the pleasantly cluttered, welcoming ambience created by the old-fashioned bird cages filling the window, some of which — to our mild alarm — contained live inhabitants, as our dynamic waiter was eager to prove when confronted with our skepticism. Perhaps aviaries are the new aquariums?
The second floor, a large noisy room packed with chattering diners, is evidently the more popular of the two, and was fully booked on a recent Saturday. The quieter, more secluded first floor may be preferable for those seeking an intimate dinner date however. 
Francesco’s team certainly go all out to make diners feel well looked after, bringing a complimentary plate of fruit before the meal and limoncello shots as a digestif. Our waiter was smart and sassy, with a ready sense of humor rarely displayed by local wait staff, and the restaurant’s Italian chef came out of the kitchen several times to ask diners if they were enjoying their food. The restaurant also has a parking service.
The menu at Francesco is diverse enough to allow diners to spend anything from a fairly modest amount to a fortune. The wine list is a weighty tome with a selection ranging from perfectly palatable house wines at 750 rubles ($21) a bottle, to rare vintages priced around the 52,000 ruble ($1,450) mark. 
The classic mozzarella salad (550 rubles, $15) was large, fresh and intensely satisfying, made with genuine Mozzarella di Bufala Campana, deep red plum tomatoes, crisp lettuce, robust basil leaves and rucola. Beef carpaccio ($11) surpassed all expectations with its divine texture and was likewise accompanied by rucola and lettuce, along with slices of parmesan. 
The only glitch in the otherwise impeccable service at Francesco was the surprising arrival of Quattro Stagioni pizza (490 rubles, $14) right on the heels of the salad. It was thin, crispy and generously adorned with eggplant, tomato, bell peppers and mozzarella, but lacked overall flavor, possibly due to the fact that it was sauce-free. When it proved too much to tackle in one sitting, our accommodating waiter was not at all averse to wrapping it up in a “doggy bag” for us, though one suspects this is not a request seen on a large scale at Ginza Project’s fashionable establishments.
The level of freshness at Francesco is laudable. Tomato soup (290 rubles, $8) was a light concoction made with fresh tomatoes, and to its credit, seemingly little else. The effect was a simple yet pleasing soup whose overwhelming flavor was not herbs, garlic or tomato puree, as is so often the case, but of appetizing, ripe tomatoes.
Another Italian classic, lasagne (420 rubles, $12) maintained the high standard, despite the pressure riding on its familiarity. The sauce was as fresh as the soup, the meat cooked to perfection, and the balance between the ingredients harmonious. Mandarin sorbet (150 rubles, $4) ended the dinner on just the right note — fresh, unusual and highly enjoyable — in keeping with the rest of the meal.

TITLE: Back on The Green, Its Business as Usual For Woods
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MARANA, Arizona — Tiger Woods had seven minutes to kill, which for a player who plans his routine to the very second, might have been unsettling. Eight months away had taught him something about patience, though, and he peeled a banana and calmly munched it as he waited for his turn on the first tee.
There were a few butterflies, but only because there always are. The day they go away, Woods says, is probably the day he will finally quit.
But the knee was fine, and the shots on the driving range felt good. An Aussie named Brendan Jones awaited, and Woods knew his opponent’s stomach had to be churning even more.
There couldn’t have been a better day to begin the task of restoring order to the world of golf.
“It felt like nothing had changed,” Woods said. “It was business as usual.”
The official time was 12:09 p.m. Mountain Standard when Woods stood on mended knee with a 3-wood in his hand and the first fairway in front of him. It had been 253 days since he was last seen limping his way to a U.S. Open title, and the brown Arizona desert was a stark contrast to the cliffs overlooking the blue Pacific at Torrey Pines.
That was the final round of a major championship, and this was just the first round of what could be a very long week.
But Woods was right. Nothing much had changed.
Yes, the knee was better. It had to be because the doctors did their job in repairing his anterior cruciate ligament, and Woods did his in hundreds of sometimes painful hours of rehabilitation.
But the swing was the same, and so were the shots. Unfortunately for Jones, so was the overwhelming will to win that Woods has always brought to the golf course.
He birdied the first hole from five feet, much to the delight of the large crowd that cheered his every move. But it was on the second hole, a 574-yard expanse of green in between towering saguaro cactuses, where any doubt either Woods or his fans had was eliminated in a single shot.
The 3-iron soared majestically toward the pin, tracking the entire way, before settling on an upper ledge of the undulating green, just 4 feet short of the hole.
“Gawd, look at that!” someone behind Woods screamed.
Look they did, and Woods looked along with them. Leaning forward on his surgically repaired left knee as he tracked the ball through the air, Woods gave an abbreviated pump of his fist.
The putt was conceded for eagle, and Jones might have just conceded the match along with it. Two holes into his comeback, Woods was dominating once again.
“As I walked off the first hole, there was just mayhem—media, and everyone was just running,” Jones said. “I was walking in amongst everybody, and I heard one of the media there say, ‘All right, only another nine holes to go for a 10-and-8.’ And I gave him a bit of a spray. And then (Woods) eagled the second and I thought, ‘Well, maybe he’s right.’ “
It wasn’t nearly that bad, with Jones making it all the way to the 16th hole before losing. But it might have been had Woods not showed a bit of rust on some early iron shots. He made three bogeys on the front nine, one of them coming on the fifth hole when he hit his drive into the rough and then dumped his second shot into a greenside bunker.
Staring at the offending ball after it left his club, Woods shouted an expletive. For the record, it was 59 minutes into the round.
The will to compete was very much alive.
“I don’t go to an event that I don’t think I can win,” Woods said. “Why go? It doesn’t make any sense to me. So I entered this event with the same intention I do every event since I was a little boy, and that’s to win.”
Woods, of course, now has his own little boy, but anyone who thought the recent birth of Charlie Axel might soften him on the course should now be thinking again. Woods talked after the round about how watching the birth of his son and teaching his daughter new words is more important than anything he does in golf, but he plays with the same intensity and fire that he did a decade ago.
Fans love every minute of it, and it’s easy to see why television ratings for tournaments featuring Woods are double the ones he misses. On this day, they had eyes for only him and basically ignored the fact 31 other matches were taking place on the same course.
“They weren’t screaming on any other matches, but you could hear them screaming out there on his match, and that’s what we needed,” Davis Love III said.
Indeed, the eight-month absence seemed to make his fellow pros realize even more than they did before how their fortunes are so closely aligned with those of Woods. He carries the sport to a new level, and when he’s not playing, there’s not much interest.
That doesn’t mean they particularly want to be next in line to take a beating, like the one awaiting Tim Clark going into the next round.
Clark is the 32nd-seeded player in the world, but he knows there’s a big gap between No. 1 and anyone else.
“I live in Scottsdale so I’m prepared to get in a car and go home if I need to,” Clark said.

TITLE: Obama Presents Budget To Combat Recession
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama is sending Congress a “hard choices” budget that would boost taxes on the wealthy and curtail Medicare payments to insurance companies and hospitals to make way for a $634 billion down payment on universal health care.
Obama’s first budget, which will top $3 trillion, predicts the deficit for this year will soar to a whopping $1.75 trillion, according to administration officials who spoke on condition of anonymity before the public unveiling of the budget Thursday. The huge deficit reflects the massive spending being undertaken to battle a severe recession and the worst financial crisis in seven decades.
As part of the effort to end the financial crisis, the administration will propose boosting the deficit by an additional $250 billion this year, enough to support as much as $750 billion in increased spending under the government’s financial rescue program. That would more than double the $700 billion bailout effort passed by Congress last October.
Obama, in a morning briefing, spoke of “hard choices that lie ahead.” He called his budget “an honest accounting of where we are and where we intend to go.”
One administration official called the request for additional bailout resources a “placeholder” in advance of a determination by the Treasury Department of what will actually be needed.
The spending blueprint Obama is sending Congress is a 140-page outline, with the complete details scheduled to come in mid to late April, when the new administration sends up the massive budget books that will flesh out the plan.
However, the submission of the bare budget outline was certain to set off fierce debate in Congress over Obama’s spending and tax priorities. The document includes additional requests for the current year and Obama’s proposals for the 2010 budget year, which begins Oct. 1.
The budget balances efforts to fulfill Obama’s campaign pledges to deliver tax cuts to the middle class, expand health care coverage and combat the economic crisis with an effort to keep an exploding deficit over the next few years from becoming a permanent drag on the economy. 
However, Republicans assailed the budget for the tax increases and some Democrats worried that Obama was not doing enough to get the deficit under control.
“I would give him good marks as a beginning, but we have to do a lot more to take on this long-term debt buildup,” said Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad.
Republicans zeroed in on the tax increases to fund half of Obama’s health care expansion.
“Everyone agrees that all Americans deserve access to affordable health care, but is increasing taxes during an economic recession, especially on small businesses, the right way to accomplish that goal?” asked House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio.
The $634 billion down payment on expanding health care coverage would come from a $318 billion increase over 10 years in taxes on the wealthy, defined as couples making more than $250,000 per year and individuals making more than $200,000. The tax increase would occur by reducing the benefit the wealthy get on tax deductions.

TITLE: Investigation Begins Into Plane Crash
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: AMSTERDAM — Investigators took detailed photos of the wreckage of a Turkish Airlines Boeing 737 and analyzed black box recordings Thursday, trying to piece together why the plane lost speed and plowed into a muddy field, killing nine people and injuring 86.
Flight TK1951 from Istanbul fell out of the sky about two miles (three kilometers) short of the runway at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport on Wednesday morning, smashing into three pieces and spraying luggage and debris across a farmer’s field. It was carrying 134 passengers and crew.
Despite the catastrophic impact, the wreckage did not burn and a good number of people walked away with only minor injuries.
The passengers and crew came from at least nine different countries, including seven Americans and three Britons, mayor Theo Weterings told reporters.
Most passengers were Dutch and Turkish, but one person each came from Germany, Taiwan, Finland, Bulgaria and Italy. Weterings said the nationalities of 15 passengers still had not been confirmed. Four of the Americans were Boeing employees.
He said 121 people were treated for injuries and six were still in critical condition. Of the others, an airport official said earlier that 25 were considered seriously hurt.
Three of those killed were Turkish pilots, Weterings said. The identities of the remaining six victims and of four critically injured passengers were still not known.
He said investigators were not yet revealing any details of their probe into the cause of the deadly crash.
At the crash site, investigators in white overalls and blue helmets clambered in and out of the wreckage Thursday while others inspected the remains of the plane’s two engines.
Fred Sanders, spokesman for the Dutch Safety Authority, said the flight’s data recorders and voice tapes were sent to Paris, where they will be analyzed, a process that takes several days.
Investigators will interview crew members, passengers and witnesses on the ground and explore a number of possible causes, including insufficient fuel, weather-related factors or bird strikes. Sanders said a preliminary result may be made public soon, although the full report will not be ready for months.
A team of Turkish experts flew to the Netherlands to help. Turkish Transport Minister Binali Yildirim also paid tribute to the pilot.
“I would like to commemorate the pilot, who at the cost of his own life, ensured that human casualties were low,” Yildirim said.
One survivor, Jihad Alariachi, said there was no warning from the cockpit to brace for landing before the ground loomed up through the drizzle.
“We braked really hard, but that’s normal in a landing. And then the nose went up. And then we bounced ... with the nose aloft” before the final impact, she said.
Witnesses on the ground said the plane dropped from about 90 meters.
Families of Turkish victims arrived on a chartered flight from Istanbul late Wednesday.

TITLE: President’s  Family Selects ‘First Dog’
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: WASHINGTON — This isn’t just another wag-the-tail story: The Obamas are getting a dog in April and are looking for a rescue Portuguese Water Dog.
First lady Michelle Obama tells People magazine that the target date for the arrival of the family pet is after her daughters’ spring break trip in April, though 7-year-old Sasha is convinced the dog is coming April 1.
“So Sasha says ‘April 1st.’ I said, ‘April.’ She says, ‘April 1st.’ It’s like, April!” said Mrs. Obama.
The Obama girls — Sasha and 10-year-old Malia — attend the private Sidwell Friends school, which has spring break March 20-29 and a day off for students on April 13.
The family wants a rescue Portuguese Water Dog who is the appropriate age and match.
“Temperamentally they’re supposed to be pretty good,” Mrs. Obama said. “From the size perspective, they’re sort of middle of the road — it’s not small, but it’s not a huge dog. And the folks that we know who own them have raved about them. So that’s where we’re leaning.”
The first couple and their daughters have been going back and forth on possible names. Among the two Mrs. Obama mentioned — and nixed — were Frank and Moose.
“Oh, the names are really bad. I don’t even want to mention it, because there are names floating around and they’re bad,” she said. “You listen and you go — like, I think, Frank was one of them. Frank!”

TITLE: Bangladeshi Military Puts Down Mutiny
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: DHAKA, Bangladesh — Mutinous Bangladeshi border guards who seized control of their headquarters completed their surrender Thursday after tanks were sent into the capital as a show of force, the government said.
The guards, who are angry over their pay, had agreed overnight to surrender after the government promised them an amnesty and agreed to look into their demands for better conditions. The death toll rose to 11 after one more body was found near the compound.
But the process stalled and the revolt looked to be spreading to other areas Thursday until the prime minister issued a harsh warning to the rebels, backed up by tanks and armored vehicles rolling through the streets of the capital.
Apparently intimidated by the move, the guards hoisted a white flag on Thursday afternoon and resumed laying down arms.
“All the mutinous border guards have surrendered their weapons,” government negotiator Mahbub Ara Gini told reporters, adding that all military officials with their families trapped inside the headquarters had been evacuated.
Home Minister Shahara Khatun said police then took control of the compound. She said no more bodies had been discovered in the compound. Officials had earlier said they feared up to 50 people were dead.
Border guards first mutinied Wednesday at the group’s headquarters in Dhaka, turning their weapons on senior officers, seizing a nearby shopping center and trapping students in a school on their compound.
Then on Thursday, despite an agreement to surrender, mutineers fired shots at the commanding officer’s residence at a border guard post in the southern town of Tekhnaf early Thursday, sending him fleeing, said police official Jalal Ahmed Chowdhury. Witnesses said violence also erupted at border guard posts in Cox’s Bazar, Chittagong and Naikhongchari in the south, Sylhet in the northeast, Rajshahi and Naogaon in the northwest.
However, no further incidents of violence were reported throughout the day.
On Thursday night, an Associated Press reporter saw tanks and armored vehicles take up positions in a residential neighborhood near the compound seized by the guards Wednesday. Local media reported seeing several more tanks heading toward the city.
The move came shortly after Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina appealed to the mutineers to surrender in a televised speech to the nation.